What Amazon Will Be Like In 2030 (AMZN)

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, provided by

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Amazon today is very different from what it was 10 years ago. In 2001, Amazon was still pretty much an online bookstore. Today not only does it sell almost everything under the sun, but it's also a huge cloud computing company, a media seller and it even makes its own gadgets.

What's more, Amazon's Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is nothing if not a long term thinker. Amazon stayed unprofitable for 8 years, including 5 as a public company, because Bezos understood that he had to reach scale before profitability. Amazon got into cloud cloud computing before almost anyone else because Bezos understood how huge it would be.

It's impossible to think Jeff Bezos doesn't have a clear idea of what Amazon will be like 20 years from now.

Of course Amazon is already the biggest online retailer. But it's still microscopic compared to the biggest offline retailers, just like online commerce is relative to offline commerce. This is changing, and fast. Twenty years from now, Amazon's commerce revenue will probably be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, like Walmart's.

Amazon will sell lots of stuff under its own brand

One of the ways retailers push down costs for consumers, which is something Amazon is fanatical about, is through store brands: products similar to common branded goods, but made in volume under the store's own brand to lower margins. Expect Amazon to do this on a huge scale 20 years from now.

It will be like eBay but much bigger

One of Amazon's biggest rivals in the early days was eBay, which also offered cheap goods to consumers, but didn't have to worry about inventory because it was secondhand. Amazon's directly competing auction system failed, but its business allowing third-parties to sell through Amazon is a rip-roaring success and eating into eBay which, itself, is sinking into irrelevance because of poor management execution. By 2030, expect Amazon to be an enormous eBay-like marketplace, except functioning much better.